For $15 an hour, any taxi driver will take you the length of this Long Island and back (about an hour and a half between the furthest points). Whether you’re stuck or just visiting or visiting and stuck — return flights are often delayed by twelve hours or a day — there are at least two full days worth of informed wandering. The otherworldly caves and mangroves and beaches of Qeshm are exceptional and untrodden, and without parallel on the more visitable coasts of the Persian Gulf.

Our driver balked when the paved road turned to dirt, making a machine gun sign with his hands and charading I don’t think you are supposed to go here with worried eyebrows. We had heard half-formed rumors about gunfire in the empty areas towards the south, potentially the army (or someone’s army) in training, but we coaxed him onwards and never had to duck and cover. We never saw anything remotely unsafe.

If the island were a dolphin — it is shaped a bit like one — the magnificent mangrove forests would be just behind its dorsal fin. The tangled roots of mangroves work to solidify the coastline, holding the mud in place and extending out into open water that covers the roots completely at high tide. A mangrove forest looks like a Venetian neighborhood. Greenery lines more than ten miles of the northern coast, stretching across the narrow Straight of Khuran almost to the shores of southern Iran. A sign points to the Jengel Hara (a.k.a. the Hara Protected Area, established 1972).

Geshm’s particular mangroves are home to the hara tree, lushous green with yellow flowers and an almond-like fruit in the summer. For twenty-five dollars a boatman singing old songs in Arabic motored us out through the shallow channels, past blue and white herons and flat-billed birds flaunting their mandibles from higher ground. When the spot looked right, we hopped off the side into the mud.

Like this:

In Hebrew, signs point to the Salt Sea. But below those letters reads the English no euphemism could touch. The Black Sea ain’t black. The Red sea ain’t red. But the Dead Sea, oh yeah — that pond is fuckin’ deceased.

In fact, the six-foot-under Sea is sinking even deeper. Less than 1,300 feet below sea level in 1970, the dead seashore now sits 1,385 feet below, and continues to recede three feet further every year. But despite the fact that decades ago the sea split into a separate North body and South body, there is one clear winner — your body.